Obama Pick for Court Is 3rd in a Row Blocked by Republicans

Obama Pick for Court Is 3rd in a Row Blocked by Republicans. This is really amazing to me.

Senate Republicans on Monday blocked President Obama’s third consecutive nominee to the country’s most powerful and prestigious appeals court and insisted they would not back down, inflaming a bitter debate over a president’s right to shape the judiciary.

By a vote of 53 to 38, the Senate failed to break a filibuster of Robert L. Wilkins, a federal judge who was nominated to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, falling seven votes short of the 60 needed. Two Republicans — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — voted with the Democrats.

The impasse over Mr. Wilkins followed Republican blockades of two other candidates for the court since Oct. 31. Unlike previous fights over judicial nominees, the dispute is not as much about the judges’ individual political leanings as it is about the overall ideological makeup of the court. Republicans have raised few objections to the three candidates’ qualifications or legal positions.

Rather, Republicans are seeking to prevent Mr. Obama from filling any of the three existing vacancies on the 11-seat court, fearing that he will alter its conservative tilt. "

Justice Roberts complains each year about the number of vacancies on federal courts. Now Obama nominates people and not because of their qualifications or even their leanings, Republicans block them, just because it's not a conservative filling the vacant seats. What happened to "elections have consequences"?

This wikipedia page has nice tables of the compositions of the courts based on which president nominated them. Currently the US Courts of Appeals have 46% appointed by Democrats and 44% appointed by Republicans and 10% of the seats are vacant. It's a recent swing back to being a plurality of Democratic appointees which wasn't the case since 2000 (and 1984 before that).

Are Democrats Finally Getting Ready to Kill the Filibuster? "At various points over the past year, Republicans have refused to confirm any nominees to the NLRB so that it would lose its quorum and be unable to pass new rules; they have refused to confirm any chairman of the CFPB in order to prevent it from functioning at all; they have threatened to destroy America's credit unless Obamacare was defunded; and now they're refusing to confirm any nominees to the DC circuit court in order to preserve its conservative tilt. Reid eventually managed to cut deals on the NLRB, the CFPB, and Obamacare, but as Feinstein says, "We left with a very good feeling there would be a new day. Well, the new day lasted maybe for a week."